1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to high performance and grid computing of data for exploration and production of hydrocarbons, such as computerized simulation of hydrocarbon reservoirs in the earth, geological modeling, and processing of seismic survey data, and in particular to quality of service (QoS) control of such computing.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the oil and gas industries, massive amounts of data are required to be processed for computerized simulation, modeling and analysis for exploration and production purposes. For example, the development of underground hydrocarbon reservoirs typically includes development and analysis of computer simulation models of the reservoir. These underground hydrocarbon reservoirs are typically complex rock formations which contain both a petroleum fluid mixture and water. The reservoir fluid content usually exists in two or more fluid phases. The petroleum mixture in reservoir fluids is produced by wells drilled into and completed in these rock formations.
A geologically realistic model of the reservoir, and the presence of its fluids, also helps in forecasting the optimal future oil and gas recovery from hydrocarbon reservoirs. Oil and gas companies have come to depend on geological models as an important tool to enhance the ability to exploit a petroleum reserve. Geological models of reservoirs and oil/gas fields have become increasingly large and complex.
In simulation and geological models, the reservoir is organized into a number of individual cells. Seismic data with increasing accuracy has permitted the cells to be on the order of 25 meters areal (x and y axis) intervals. For what are known as giant reservoirs, the number of cells is the least hundreds of millions, and reservoirs of what is known as giga-cell size (a billion cells or more) are encountered.
Similar considerations of data volume are also presented in seismic data processing. Seismic data obtained from surveys over large areas of the earth's surface such as above giant reservoirs, has been acquired and made available in increased volumes. In processing vast amounts of data of all three of the types described above, processing time was an important consideration.
Three types of computer systems have been available for processing the vast amounts of data of the types encountered in petroleum exploration and production. These are supercomputers, high performance computing (HPC) and grid computing. Typically, supercomputers are specially designed for particular calculation intensive tasks. An HPC system takes the form of a group of powerful workstations or servers, joined together as a network to function as one supercomputer. Grid computing involves a more loosely coupled, heterogeneous and often dispersed network of workstations or servers than HPC.
So far as is known, existing distributed memory HPC and grid computing systems did not provide proper quality of service (QoS) based communication because of two limitations. First, standard communication libraries such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) did not provide a capability for applications to specify service quality for computation and communication. Second, modern high-speed interconnects such as Infiniband, Myrinet, Quadrics and Gigabit Ethernet were optimized for performance rather than for predictability of communication latency and bandwidth.
There has been, so far as is known, little attention given to QoS control in high performance and grid computing. HPC users have witnessed a dramatic increase in performance over the last ten years with regard to the HPC systems. What used to take one month of HPC computation time in the ten years ago, is now taking only a few hours to run in current systems.
In view of this, the simplest remedy to users for a data accuracy failure rate during a routine computation run has been resubmitting the processing data run after disregarding or offlining (or what is known as fencing) the problematic node/core. However, the hours of the crashed job were thus discarded and wasted. Moreover, in the case of a more extensive data processing run which would require several days or even weeks to perform, resubmitting the entire data set for processing was required. This was duplicative and time consuming.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,526,418, which is owned by the assignee of the present application, relates to a simulator for giant hydrocarbon reservoirs composed of a massive number of cells. The simulator mainly used high performance computers (HPC). Communication between the cluster computers was performed according to conventional, standard methods, such as MPI mentioned above and Open MP.
U.S. Published Patent Application No. 2011/0138396 related to a data distribution mechanism in HPC clusters. The focus of the system described was methodology to enable data to be distributed rapidly to various computation nodes in an HPC cluster. Thus, the focus and teachings of this system were improving processing speed by more rapidly distributing data to the cluster nodes.